One does noses, the other just eyes. The plastic surgeon of the ‘90s, more often than not, is a specialist. Here, a look into the lives and minds of some of the country’s best.
Did you like the caviar, Doctor?
A satisfied customer with Iranian connections is making nice to Sherrell Jerone Aston. M.D. Nothing is too good for such a miracle worker, a surgeon who can erase years.
We will not be making judgments today about the relevance or political correctness of cosmetic surgery. In a perfect world, we would all be valued for brains, wit and how good we are to our mothers. We are going to assume here that so long as you continue to draw breath, you will care about looking youthfully, competitively attractive, and that when Clairol Estee Lauder and Jenny Craig have given their all to the cause, you may consider surgical enhancement. Although such rejuvenation is now regarded in a more casual and diminutive manner (“a little nip and tuck”), it is still surgery. There are 1,000 members of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, and some of them make a living by correcting the mistakes of other members. This is no time for amateurs, old coots or bargains. You want a doctor who is (ahem) on the cutting edge.
The plastic surgeons singled out here—one specialist per, shall we say, body part—are among the-best in their profession. They teach courses at venerable universities. They have made ground-breaking strides in the technique of their specialties. And they‘ve
“done” the women we look at in magazines and movies and at lunch at The Ivy. Funny enough, when Town & Country approached these doctors to participate in this story and asked them to recommend other top surgeons, they almost all wound up mentioning each other.
Dr. Sherrell J. Aston: Face Value
Lite FM broadcasts from Operating Room 1 at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat hospital. Rod Stewart is singing as Sherrell (pronounced Shir-ELLE) Aston’s patient is rolled in, her face and scalp marked with purple “Skin Skribe” in the exact places to be cut. The usually dapper doctor is well disguised in regulation green scrubs, blue booties wrapped around running shoes and an extremely nonregulation printed cap, courtesy of his girlfriend. The soon to be divorced Aston already jogged around Central Park and had a boss of granola before his first surgery of the day, at 7:30. He’s been staving off his own aging process, eating high-carb/low-fat and jogging since his Virginia childhood. ‘The neighbors would say, ‘What’s wrong with that boy?’” he recalls. “But I’ll also have my face lifted, no question about that. I want to live long enough in good health to need at least three face-lifts.”
Today he’s doing the face, forehead and eyelids of a 59-year-old woman who has run for high public office. Perhaps you think your face includes your forehead and eyelids, but in this nomenclature, a face-lift includes everything from the collarbone to the corners of the eyes ($12,000 to $15.000). Forehead ($6,000) and eyes ($6,000 to $7.000) are a la carte. Younger patients may qualify for the “mini lift” (a term Aston dislikes for its day-at-the- spa connotations), which excludes the neck and costs about half.
The clenched face-lift that makes you look like you’ve been strapped to the wing of a plane is an anachronism. ‘Today the way the skin is pulled to create tension is different,” explains Aston,” so we don’t see from well-trained plastic surgeons the tight faces of a few years ago, when the operation was mainly pulling the skin up. Now, most of the tension is placed on the underlying foundation, the muscles and the fascia [the muscle lining] covering them. In order to accomplish the hardest part of a face-lift, which is the droop in the midportion of the face, we actually lift that fat pad and put it back up on the cheekbone where it came from. That’s one of the most re